


Homecoming

by baixue88



Category: Far Cry 4
Genre: F/M, Past Relationship(s), Reunions, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-12
Updated: 2014-12-12
Packaged: 2018-03-01 03:44:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2758349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/baixue88/pseuds/baixue88
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spoilers abound!</p><p>Based on a prompt by ishwari-ghale.tumblr.com</p><p>AU: Ajay dies and Ishwari survives. She must bring him back to Lakshmana.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Homecoming

Getting into Kyrat was almost suspiciously easy. No-one questioned the fake Kyrati passport Ishwari carried, which showed a slightly younger woman named Abhijita Khan. She looked out the window as the buss rolled up to the border. Even from here she could smell smoke, heavy and industrial and slightly sweet. She clutched Ajay tight to her chest and scooted down in her seat, but not so much that she couldn’t get a good view of the country she’d once called home.

 Down the hills, she could see factories belching smog into the air. What was once farmland, healthy and pregnant, had been razed over with a sea of lavender. _Poppies_ , she knew: poppies grown well over their normal population, engineered to survive the harshest of temperatures and altitudes. They used to grow wild in the fields when she was a little girl. She’d pick them and bring them to her mama, or make wreathes to decorate her hair, or lay a bouquet devoutly at the feet of Kyra. Now they overcame the fields, choked the grasses, coating the hills like a pestilence.

  _Pagan, what have you done?_ She knew well enough. She’d read the news on BBC, heard the rumors from other refugees in the States. Pagan had forgotten himself, forgotten her. She’d always believed, in her heart of hearts, that he’d come and find her once the danger was past, but she should have known better. He was too proud for that. He was always too proud.

 Pagan had forgotten her, forgotten her people, well and truly become the Foreigner of the Ghale thangka. He had never come for her, preferring to let the distance grow between them until it was wider than all the lands and seas between their physical bodies. He had probably never even bothered to look for her, knowing him, knowing his rage, knowing his infinite propensity for holding a grudge.

 At first she’d been hopeful. Perhaps he had understood. Perhaps he had read her letter and believed her. Perhaps he was coming for her, soon, one day. But time wore on, and Ajay grew up with no memory of his homeland or his language or his people. Ishwari had soon learned to accept the reality that he had never forgiven her, that maybe he’d never cared that much in the first place. They had been so young and drunk on sex and each other, so carried away with youthful recklessness and the assumption that love was an ever-flowing spring, vivacious and refreshing.

 The rumors coming out of Kyrat only seemed to confirm what Ishwari suspected. He was crueler than ever, executing people on a whim, sending them to the gulags for the slightest of offenses. Perhaps, she’d begun to think, that was all he ever really was. Perhaps, in her love-drunkenness, she’d been in love with an illusion, a youthful anomaly that would only give way to rottenness the way Mohan had sworn it would. He’d been so fresh-faced at twenty-two, and maybe that eager young man was only the embryo of what he would inevitably become.

 She’d known his faults back then, and loved him anyway. But Gods, what flaws! He was proud and stubborn and easily pricked, and when she met him his hands had already been stained deep red. If she had stayed back then, would things have turned out any differently? At first she’d been able to hold him back, turn him away from his cruel instincts, but that couldn’t have lasted forever, could it?

 As time went on, the ache lessened, and she began to be truly grateful for her life hidden away in the heart of L.A. The culture was hard to get used to, yes, and people would be unkind to her sometimes because of her accent, but she had Ajay, and they had been safe.

  _The irony of it_ , she thought, running a hand over Ajay’s urn. _I brought him out of here to be safe, but it’s the Americans that killed him._

 A robbery, a misfired gun, paid leave for the green deputy who’d acted in a panic. She might have fought, but she was alone and fragile and it was so hard to make anyone listen to her voice, so heavy with her accent. After the remission of the cancer, she no longer had the energy or the money to fight. All she could do for him now was bring him home. This was the least she could do for Ajay, for Lakshmana, for Pagan. He would rest next to his little sister, in the home of the man who would have acted as his own father in a better world.

 If things went according to plan, she’d be in and out, the only trace of her presence in that little clay jar and the photo she’d brought of one happy day when Ajay had come to visit. He was smiling and laughing in embarrassment in the photo. “Ma, come on!” He’d begged with a sheepish grin, but she’d insisted, smoothing his rough hair with her spit and snapping a quick photo. She pulled the photo out of her pocket and gazed at it. She had to keep her strength for what came next.

 It was not hard to sneak into the palace if you knew how. Ishwari remembered it well from her spy days: the laundresses and maids, carefully trained to be neither seen nor heard, moved like ghosts through the palace and descended – if they did not live in the servants’ quarters – to the fortified town below every evening.

 She found one of those girls at home, watched her from the corner. Nobody paid her any attention. She had dressed in her dowdy old clothes from all those days ago, and they marked her as just another worker or farmer’s wife.

 The servant girl nearly screamed when Ishwari slid silently through her window, but Ishwari was ready: she held up a fistful of American money, the last of her savings, and the girl shut her mouth. The next morning, bright and early, Ishwari was in the maid’s uniform waiting for the bus that would bring all the servants up the hill to the palace. She sat in the tiny bus, hip to hip with all the other maids, and cradled Ajay where he lay snug against her belly.

 Nothing had changed but the door through which she entered. A guard ushered them through a side door, not even bothering to look at their faces. Ishwari found the girl’s name on the list of duties and grabbed a feather duster, moving with that quiet, humble confidence of one who belongs where she is and knows what she is about.

  _Thank you, Banashur,_ she prayed silently, _for this disguise_ , and she began to work lightly from the bottom floor up, looking all the while for hints of anything that might be Lakshmana’s final resting place. She knew Pagan: he wouldn’t scatter the ashes to the winds. No, what Pagan would do was enshrine them in lasting memory. He did not forget things. All that was left to her was to find that shrine – hopefully within the day.

 She hoped against hope that it was on the first floor, but as she moved from room to room, carefully dusting all the statues from the thick-laying incense residue, that hope began to dwindle. There was nothing to be found. No trace of Lakshmana. There was only the stillness and the incense, broken only by the bustle of servant girls and the chirping of birds outside.

 She was beginning to run out of energy by the time she reached the dining room, the last room on the ground floor. She stepped through the cracked-open door, sighing at the ache in her muscles. Chemo had drained her of so much of her old vigour, and she was not the energetic woman she had been so long ago. She raised her arms in a stretch and froze, a gasp caught in her throat. There he was, staring back at her from the wall, his face lined with the advancing age that he had done his best to stave off or disguise. Nearly all his hair – still bleached blonde, of course, after all this time – was shaved off, leaving only a brush of gelled strands that swept over his brow just like the young models on American billboards. Age had been both kind and cruel to him. As young as he looked, he seemed desperate to cling to it, putting on all the airs of the boy she’d once known.

Ishwari drew in a shaky breath and stepped around the bar – that was new – to the portrait, and began to dust the frame. There were too many memories in the rest of this room for her to even begin looking at it. She and Pagan had eaten here, every night, among other things. She remembered vividly the night he swept the fine china from the table and pressed her down onto the table, ripping off her panties and taking her right then and there, not caring at all at the risk of a servant walking in. They had been drunk on wine and laughing until they cried, and then suddenly they’d begun kissing in that starving, fevered way that only the young can when they’re sure they’re going to die otherwise. In minutes, they had been on the table, making love until they were both howling.

 Ishwari dropped her hands to her sides and left the room. She couldn’t bear it. It was bad enough being back here, in this building, so long after everything was broken apart. Staying in the rooms with the most memories was too much, and she prayed that she would not have to enter his bedroom. That would be all the worse.

 She began anew her search for Lakshmana. He probably kept it in the Chinese way, in the heart of his home, but where would he consider that to be? The bedroom? His office? She’d have to check both. She climbed the servant’s stairway to the upper hall much faster than she should have, and when she got to the top she had to pause a while and get back her energy before moving forward down the hall. A breath of air was all she allowed herself; it was all she could afford. As she moved, she listened carefully for a voice, the opening of a door. Nothing. It was utter silence. Perhaps, for once, he was not at home. She listened once more outside his office door for good measure and then, ever so carefully, turned the handle with trembling fingers.

 Empty. She sighed in relief, and looked around. It was almost exactly as she remembered it. Everything in its proper spot: the rows of collector’s sets of books with matching leather bindings, an antique turntable in the corner (hooked up to a first-rate modern sound system) with a little cabinet of records beside it. There was his huge old oak desk, too, a “hand-down” from the former king. These days, it had a large computer screen on it. Pagan had even installed a huge flatscreen on the wall where an ancient thangka used to hang. Below it, in a locked glass display, was the golden medallion worn by the previous dynasty of kings. It was a counterfeit, of course. Pagan kept the real one in his vault. Still, it was a good show for visiting dignitaries.

And, of course, there was not a single trace of Lakshmana – except, of course, for the little golden statue of a bird that stood in the corner of his desk. That had been Pagan’s present to her on her first birthday, and she had patted it and cooed “birdie” over and over. Ishwari felt a stab of pain in her heart and squeezed her eyes shut.

  _I can’t stop and cry. I have to keep looking_. She took a breath, steeled herself, and nearly jumped out of her skin as the door opened behind her.

 “Dammit, Yuma, _no_. I need you at home. I am _not_ funding more back-packing field trips. This is getting ridiculous.”

 She knew that voice. It was heavier and lined with age, but she would not forget that voice even if she lived to be a hundred. She knew it like she knew the voice of her own mother.

 Ishwari wasted no time. She got hastily to dusting as if she’d been doing so the whole time, keeping her back carefully turned to the man who now sat down at his desk and continued talking to Yuma, tapping something on the wood in restless irritation. He turned on his computer, smartphone tucked between jaw and shoulder.

 “Bùxíng à!” he spat in Chinese. “I don’t give a single, solitary fuck! Wait…how big? In _tons_?”

 Ishwari was shaking. She could feel his presence like an electric current. His smell, his voice, his warmth filled the room. She was suffocating. She did a little more dusting for show – all she could manage with shaking hands – and exited hastily, never letting him get a full glimpse of her face. If he did, it was over. _If he recognizes me, I’m lost_.

 She was halfway down the hall when she heard the office door open again behind her.

 “Deng yi xia, Yuma. Hey! You there! What exactly do you think you’re doing?”

 Ishwari froze in her tracks. _Run, run, run_. But she couldn’t move. She was rooted to the spot.

“Do you call that dusting? I can still see an inch-thick carpet of it on my TV, and I would appreciate a clean screen for my daily news. Who the fuck hired you? Clearly you have no decent work experience. Hello? I am speaking to you, and common courtesy would dictate that you turn around and acknowledge your fucking _king_.”

A gloved hand closed on her arm and now she tried to move, tried to get away, bucking like a wild animal. But he was too strong, and she was twisted around where she stood, still trying desperately to hide her face from him.

His cell phone clattered to the floor, forgotten. “You,” he whispered. “ _Ishwari_.” It came out like a sob.

“Pagan.”


End file.
